Customer Experience

“Mary Queen of Shops”. Mary Portas gets rave reviews, helping small, struggling retailers find their feet again. She is very successful and her formula makes for good TV. I’ve only seen the one programme, a couple of weeks ago where she was invited to help a bakery in Raynes Park; a place I know well having gone to school just round the corner. The owner, Angela, was stuck in the past, selling white bread and iced cakes from the seventies. It seemed she beleived that Mary would revamp the interior design of her shop not overhaul her whole product set. The editing didn’t help her, she came accross as a rude and throroughly unpleasent woman. If her business goes up the wall, serves her right.

Yet reading reviews in the run up to the programme made me reflect on this judgement. What was being proscribed was formulaic and too be expected. Focus upon specialty breads go for the chattering middle class market, bring Borough Market and its bread stalls to the Raynes Park suburban semis. The reviews reveal that actually the bakery is well thought of in the community.

Maher bakery is simply one of the great family establishments in South West London. It’s run by the delightful Angela,who is an example to all of us. Long may it be serve and entertain its happy customers for another 36 years!!…….

There is a market for something other than what the current trend dictates. There is clearly a demand for the experience that the Maher bakery offers. Speciality breads are the easy answer, not necessarily the right answer.

The fact that it is old fashioned, the egg and bacon baps are the best in SW anywhere and the friendly atmosphere are exactly the reasons why it is so popular and always busy on Saturday mornings…says we who have been coming for more than 15 years.

It reminds me of the working with retail banks in the dot com era, predictions of the death of branch banking and the closure of the high street banks. My colleagues poured scorn on me when I tried to defend the branch bank (something I had direct experience of, having spent time working in them); other than the poor and elderly (who were not profitable to the bank), why maintain a costly, dated branch network? Times change and branch banking is becoming fashionable again. Nat West have just launched a new campaign with 14 committments to “becoming Britains most helpful bank”. Commitment Number one is to “open more branches on Saturdays and extend the opening hours in [their] busiest branches” and they aim to “support the communities in which [they] live and work”. That is what high street banks used to do. Until someone like Mary Queen of Shops persuaded them to get on board the new cargo cult. And now the new banking innovation is to throw all that cargo cult thinking away and take inspiration from the past.

Sometimes innovation is bucking the trend. Like the Raynes Park bakery that does what it has always done; do it well, and continuously exceed your customer expectations.

Here’s a good example of an outbound email from Ocado that uses simple data (anniversary of customer’s registration) to good effect. You don’t need to do any segmentation or anything complicated, hold the personalization engine, this is data you have by default.

When Autotrader developed their cool and innovative iPhone app, they presumedly never paused to think what the DVLA would think.

Let’s say you are waiting at the traffic lights and you see a car you like and you think to yourself ‘I’d like one of those’ With the Autrotrader app all you need do was take a photo of the reg plate. From that, details of the make and model would appear and similar cars for sale close to you your current proximity would be displayed. Sadly, this functionality has been canned. Autotrader say:

The DVLA has requested that Auto Trader remove the image recognition element of the iPhone application. Although the app in no way infringes data privacy regulations, the ‘snap’ function conflicts with the DVLA’s code of ethics, as it allows consumers to capture images of vehicle license plates.

With localisation being championed as one of the hottest topics of 2010 combined with the ubiquitous use of camera phones, it is clear that technology and the opportunities that it brings are moving at a faster pace than the ‘public opinion’ (read Daily Mail Opinion) that the DVLC is clearly running scared of.
So what?

So when you are envisioning and playing innovation games, have a session where you play devils advocate and tease out what angry from Tunbridge wells would think. Kill your idea as many ways as you can. Can you identify risks you’d otherwise missed (such as DVLA’s dinosaur thinking), or does it uncover new ideas or alternative ways of doing things (to bring out a cheesy quote from Benjamin Franklin “out of adversity comes opportunity”). There is of course always another alternative, to leave the innovation to others, for others to face the wrath of Government quangos and follow fast. But that is a blog post for another time.

Interesting times in the UK retail banking industry. The public consider the banks to be pariahs; cue a number of new entrants to the market. Virgin, Tesco, the Post Office, Metro Bank, the one thing they all share is the focus upon the customer experience that is perceived to be broken with the established players.

Let’s leave aside the dictionary definition of a fan “an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer of a sport, pastime, celebrity, etc.:” (an enthusiastic devotee of a bank? Now that’s a stretch goal) Or the fact that it’s origin is a shortened term for fanatic (what are the consequences for having customers with unquestionable loyalty when you evolve and want to do things different? Will MetroBank one day have a Glazer Manchester United moment?!)

Placing the customer at the heart of everything you do is more than just the shiny stuff at the front of house. “A friendly welcome to dogs and their owners, with water bowls and dog biscuits on hand for man’s best friend – dogs rule at Metro Bank!” said the bank’s announcement. It is more than paying lip service to a social media strategy (Rentokil thought they could get all social without taking their traditional PR along on the ride – see what happened). It is about having the right infrastructure in place; robust systems and flexible processes. It is about investing in the unsexy stuff that rarely sees the light of day, because if you don’t do this things will inevitably go wrong. When the bank upsets a customer because the systems don’t allow the customer to do what they want, or make a mistake, perceived or otherwise, no amount of doggy bowls and seven day opening hours are going to get around that one. Metrobank and the new entrants are well placed to avoid too many of the issues that the incumbents face when trying to be truly customer centric, but they will be doing themselves no favours if they don’t place as much emphasis on the back end systems that the marketing team don’t see or understand as much as the shiny stuff in the branches.

Take a look at this and tell me what information it conveys to you. Look at the order status…

Dispatched.

So five days later when I ring up Laskys to find out what has happened to my product I’m told “we’re sorry, the product is out of stock. Would you like another similar product?” I’m not exactly a happy chappy to find this out five days after the order has been placed. I’ve been to ‘my account’ to track my order and it tells me that the order has (click on the help icon) “been processed and either has a delivery date or has been delivered”. Well no actually, it is out of stock and your eCommerce system hasn’t accommodated that scenario in the customer experience. Sorry Laskys, you lied to me.

“We did actually send you an email on the 8th of March to let you know this”. So I went back through my mailbox and indeed they had sent me a mail. I use gmail. The mail was unread, but I get so many mails I don’t always open them, especially as gmail gives you the title and the first line of the mail. The mail in question from Customer Service was titled “Your Order” and the following first line; “Thank you for placing an order with Laskys. TheSEBO X4 EXTRA on order 025”. nothing there to suggest that it was out of stock. Just a generic subject and first line of copy. They had taken my phone number as part of the process; no-one thought to ring me. Overall a poor experience. I won’t be buying from Laskys again and I suggest you don’t either.

There’s a lesson here. It is easy to focus upon the shiny stuff, to get customers converting, clicking on that buy button. But if the post-buy button experience is lacking; if you haven’t factored in operational excellence into your process, in the long run it is likely to cost you.

Agile software development is inherently democratic. Choice over Prescription could be included in the Agile manifesto. We give the customer the choice, the choice to decide what is most important to them, what will deliver the greatest value and build that first. We do not prescribe that they must build a complex framework first- the software will evolve, You ain’t gonna need it (Yagni) until you need it.

The problem with this democracy, with this unleashed choice is that, if you don’t have the right mix of stakeholders, the (agile project) customer doesn’t always know what is best. They are not always the best people to choose.

There is a difference between domain knowledge and what I’ll call ‘experience’ knowledge. A banker may know the banking domain inside and out, they can tell you the difference between all the different types of balance and how (and where) they are calculated; closing balance, running balance, etc. But unless they have done any research with customers, unless they have ‘experience knowledge’, when it comes to a question such as which balance to provide as an SMS alert, their ‘domain’ knowledge is as good as your common-sense.

Imagine software were a supermarket store. IT are responsible for the construction of the store, the basic layout, the signage, the checkout, the peripherals. The business are responsible for what goes into the store, the merchanising, the planogram. The business imperative is to fill the shelves and shift the product. They want to spend their money to this goal, anything that does not directly support this will be of lower priority. That is their domain and they will prioritise that over anything else. If they could fill the store with nothing but shelves they’d probably be happy.

Now imagine visiting the store. There’s no carpark, there are no shopping trolleys, there’s no emergency exits. There’s no ramp for disabled customers. The shelves rise to eight foot high (with no steps to reach the heights), the aisles are difficult to negotiate because of promotional displays between the shelves. The business is happy, but what about the customer?

In the agile world, nobody is going to pay attention to this stuff unless it is prioritised. “Sorry, we didn’t build any shopping trolleys because you prioritised building more shelf space over them”.

When stating their choice, your stakeholder wears a commercial hat, they are thinking about their targets and those are based upon shifting product. They are living in thier operational business domain. But cold commercials are not what shifts product. It is the experience that does. Now go back to the democracy of choice on an agile project. Who is the ‘business’ specifiying requirements? Is it a balanced team? Is their an experience champion with an equal voice? Is the voice of the customer recgognised? If not, isn’t about time you got an customer experience champion onto the team.

This is a model I often see in organisations when it comes to their web presence. A product owner comes up with a commercial proposition, marketing work up the content, IT build the functionality and it is goes live. With this model, no-one actually owns the customer experience.

Now let’s construct a model where the roof of the temple is a compelling customer experience.

What are the ingredients of this new temple model? It is still going to be founded upon commercial propositions, but they are going to be overlaid by a culture of test and learn. That is a willingness and ability to experiment; to realise that what you have developed is never final and is always evolving. It is about taking the learnings of experiments to inform and improve the experience, or to rapidly refine or kill propositions that just do not work.

Unfortunately these pillars tend to sit within organisational silos; content and personality are ‘owned’ by marketing, functionality by IT, and operational excellence (that’s all about fulfilling on the customer promise and beyond) is a mixture of IT and operations. Usability is a ‘funny one’ in that might sit alone, sit in marketing or sit in IT. But ultimately it is best placed to direct the horizonal filter of Quality Control. Quality control is not an additional layer of bureaucracy, rather a cultural component that all the pillars feed into. It is about ensuring consistency and meaningfulness of the experience. It is about balancing the commercial needs of the product, with the marketing needs of the message and the delivery capability of IT.

What customers say they like and how they behave are not the same thing. Don’t always trust what you are told, use data and real insights to drive decisions that have major commercial implications.

So there was a skyscraper, banner and numerous MPUs across the website. A survey panel was set up and the results came back. The agency briefed the team, “Your customers really don’t like all the ads you have on the page”. The message was reiterated in focus groups. Ditch the ads. This would be a painful decision, despite customer’s not liking them they were still delivering reasonable revenue.

The organisation was striving to be more customer-centric; if the advertisements were degrading the customer experience then removing them would be a price worth paying. And so they were switched off.

The result? Nothing. Except lost revenue. Analysing the data, customer volumes remained the same. There was no difference in the successful completion of customer goals. Switching the ads off had no impact on customer behaviour on the site; when asked customers said they didn’t like them, but what they said and what they did were different things.

The moral: if you are going to use emotion and what customers say to make commercial decisions, consider A/B testing with real data before making wholesale changes.

I’ve got a query about an Account I opened with Alliance and Leicester. I’ve got a letter that provides me with an account number and a phone number, it reads “…if you have any further question [sp] please contact a member of the team on 0844 5619737“. So I ring the number.

Hmmm. I don’t have any of those things to hand, they are not on the letter. I’ve got my debit card, but that’s obviously on a different system. I put the phone down and return to the letter, near the bottom, in bold it gives another number “if you would like us to send you information in the future in larger print…” I ring this number. It doesn’t work.

So I go to the website and look for a telephone number. I’m an existing customer. I select my product and ring the number on the page.

I don’t have that information to hand. I choose another product. Same message. I’m getting frustrated. There’s a page titled “Other enquiries“. Lots of words, but no number. I navigate to the complaints page, it has a number. Hey! Kill two birds with the same stone, speak to someone in their complaints department, make a complaint about how my time is being wasted trying to find a number and get transferred to the relevant department.

Frustration turns to anger. I find a number for new customers. I get through the IVR and finally talk to someone. “I need to transfer you to the relevent department” she says. OK. The line goes silent. And then goes dead. Lovely. Stress. I give up and start the motions of closing the account.

There’s nothing unique about Alliance and Leicester. I hate to pick on them. But this seems like a case of a lack of joined up thinking. When you are designing processes or procedures, don’t just think about them from the business perspective, take a persona and test them with real people in roll plays. What if someone doesn’t have what you expect them to have? Customers do not always behave according to the expected happy path. What are you doing about that?

Personas are ‘pen portraits’ that bring to life users or customers of a system, service or product. Giving a personality and back story to your customers helps keep your thinking true to their real needs and goals. Rather than using ‘user’ or a segment descriptor such as ’empty nester’, or ‘this is what I would do’, what would Sally do?

Here’s a set of personas for financial service organisations, geared towards the retail / B2C market. Sally is included (Shes skint).

Marc McNeill

For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He co-authored the book Agile Experience Design. As a consultant with ThoughtWorks he brought design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across their organisations with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. Today he is Customer Experience Director at Auto Trader. He has been known to dance and is rather partial to mangos.